Shapeways’ 3-D Printing Factory Tour Reveals the Handmade Future

This month, Wired highlights the 3-D printable designs and renders of its readers in the Wired 3-D Print-Off. Our top selections will be printed by Shapeways and profiled on our site. Check the guidelines, tips, and current submissions, and send your masterpiece, or first-ever design attempt.

The second thing is the sheer number of people involved. When we talk about 3-D printing, we emphasize its seamlessness and ease of use. "Your ideas made real with Shapeways 3-D printing," says Shapeways' front page. It's easy to overlook the number of steps between sending in a CAD file and getting the result delivered to your home. All of those steps involve a human.

We'd like to show you how Shapeways makes ideas real.

Photo: courtesy Shapeways

Our Object

To do this, we're going to follow this nice-looking prototype object created by Studio Mode/modeLab, a Brooklyn-based design studio. Here's how it comes out.

It began as a 3-D CAD file. Shapeways accepts STL, Collada or X3D files and you upload an order through their website. Once the order is completed, it is routed to one of Shapeways' facilities for printing, depending on the materials that were chosen.

Because this object is being printed in white nylon material, it is being sent to the Long Island City facility, which employs 15 people, ranging from 3-D printing and production engineers to distribution specialists.

3-D Tetris

In many ways, Shapeways is like any other contemporary manufacturing company and the steps in this story will be familiar to anyone familiar with a factory. The big thing that's different is that Shapeways deals almost exclusively in unique objects and small runs. This means that the production line can't simply be tooled up and run automatically. Every new object that comes in potentially requires solving a new manufacturing problem, which is why so much human supervision is required.

That begins here, with the tray plan. Laser sintering involves laying down layers of material and selectively melting the parts you want to turn solid. It takes up to 48 hours to run a job and most 3-D objects are smaller than the full capacity of the machine, so Shapeways runs them in batches.

The tray plan interface allows a specialist to arrange objects from different orders together. The objects are turned and rotated to fit them together as efficiently as possible. It's a little like playing 3-D Tetris if every piece was something completely unique that you'd never seen before.

Photo: courtesy Shapeways

The Printer

Shapeways uses an EOS printer for laser-sintering jobs. It works by heating a chamber to just below the melting point of the nylon, which is between 374 degrees Fahrenheit and 662 degrees Fahrenheit. A layer of nylon is laid down and then the laser melts the parts that are destined to be part of an object. Another layer of nylon is laid down and lasered, and so on. The powder that wasn't melted serves as a support material, holding up hollow parts as the process goes on.

Here's the thing. This is a physical process happening in the world. Atmospheric conditions like temperature and humidity can impact the quality of the prints, so technicians must recalibrate the machines to ensure that the parts come out OK. "Machine calibration varies amongst 3-D printing companies and is something we don't publicly comment on," says Elisa Richardson, Shapeways' PR & Social Media Manager. "3-D printing is like cooking. The less variables you have the greater the control you have and therefore greater reliability and repeatability."

A Block of Nylon, With Parts Inside

Once the print is completed, the hot block of nylon powder with objects inside is removed from the printer and left to cool. This typically takes about as long as the job took to run in the first place. It isn't normally stored like you see here — this is from a promo video. But it gives a good sense of what the block looks like.

Photo: courtesy Shapeways

Removing the Part

When the block has cooled off, a technician has to manually dig through the powder and extract the objects hidden inside. This requires some care as some objects are made of very thin parts. If you squint carefully, you can see the outlines of our prototype.

The excess powder is saved to be reused in a future printing run. In fact, prints made of powder that has gone through the heating and cooling cycle are noticeably stronger than fresh powder. Every print run uses a mixture of old and new powder.

The Cleaned Object

Once the objects have had the bulk of the powder brushed off, they are taken to a cleaning station where pressurized air is used to blast away the rest of the excess material. Let us be clear about this: Every single object that comes out of Shapeways has been cleaned by hand.

Photo: courtesy Shapeways

The Tumbler

Some projects want a smoother finish and those objects are polished using this tumbler. The objects are buried in clay pellets. The machine slowly agitates the whole mixture, wearing away the roughness on the surface of the objects.

Here, again, Shapeways must make judgement calls and decisions. As their clients push the limits of what the printers can pump out, delicate parts can be crushed or broken by the grinding ceramics. Occasionally, a hollow piece with fine mesh surfaces will allow a pellet inside, with no way to get it back out. Shapeways is always refining its processes based on what it learns when new projects pass through the system.

Photo: courtesy Shapeways

The Packing Station

Once the objects have been cleaned and perhaps polished or dyed, they are ready for shipping. Shapeways employs a team of distribution specialists to match completed objects to the rest of a shipment (often clients will order several things at once). Each yellow container holds the parts of a shipment until the inventory management system indicates that everything is together and ready to send.

Here, we're beginning to see the outlines of a normal manufacturing chain except for one problem…

Being Packed

Every object being unique means that every object has different packaging needs. Unlike, say, an assembly line of iPods, it's not simply a matter of running an automated process. Distribution specialists have to manually prepare shipments to ensure they'll survive the trip.